What did the women of Park Slope do this Mother’s Day?

I caught my downstairs’ neighbor hiding out on a bench outside the Mojo reading "New York Magazine," while her husband prepared a Mother’s Day feast. She looked blissed out and serene. "I was afraid to go home," she said. "Afraid there’d be something I’d have to do."

A mother I know dug joyfully into the dirt of her Third Street stoop garden planting geraniums and flats of other annuals. There was dirt beneath her fingernails and a  look of utter contentment on her face.

Wherever I went, women wished one another, "Happy Mother’s Day," looking pleased that some attempt was being made to indulge them, to give them a break from the usual routine.

My mother, sister, brother-in-law and my clan ate a late brunch at the Stone Park Cafe, where more than one table had a young baby strapped onto a dad while a mom ate her brunch undisturbed — happy to be allowed to finish her food without stopping to appease baby.

There were many multi-generational parties: toddlers, mothers, grandmothers, even great grandmothers smushed together at tables in that crowded restaurant that recently earned two stars from the New York Times.

The staff looked exhausted, eager for the day, considered by many to be one of the busiest restaurant days of the year, to be done. The restaurant was chaotic with loud rock ‘n roll blaring: the music an obvious ploy to get people to eat quickly and leave.

At our table, a fast fight broke out between my mother and sister: something silly, no doubt. Probably a perceived slight. It threatened to escalate like wild fire but something intervened: god, the universe, common sense. Maybe it was just the drink order. Civility was restored before everyone was even aware of what had gone on.

My sister appreciated my gift of a newly revised version of Dr. Spock’s famous, "Baby and Child Care:" a little light reading before her trip next week to Russia, when she and her husband will meet their nine month old baby girl for the first time.

When my son saw the book he thought it might have something to do with Spock from Star Trek.

My brother-in-law made a toast to all the mothers at the table, including my sister "the mother to-be."  To which my mother added: "Mamainwaiting, as the blog says!"

Here, here.

Late in the day, my sister and I drank Chardonnay in her living room and looked through a box of her photographs. There were pictures of my son, now a gangly 14, as a newborn, a toddler, at his 6th birthday (a Beatles party), and my daughter, now 8, as a newborn, at her first birthday, naked on a Cape Cod beach, and on and on…

"It all goes by so fast," I said sounding like every other mother in the world. "Enjoy it while it lasts," again stating the obvious cliche. But in that moment, clutching a handfull of fantastic memories, it felt unbearably true.

-Louise G. Crawford